


More Things In Heaven And Earth

by boxparade



Series: Shakespeareisms [1]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Afterlife, Domestic, F/M, Kid Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-25
Updated: 2011-09-25
Packaged: 2017-10-24 00:52:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/257023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boxparade/pseuds/boxparade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>David walked lazily up to the porch, wrapping an arm around his wife’s waist and leaning his head down on her shoulder. Jeannie didn’t flinch; she’d known he’d been there for awhile. The sunlight—at least, it was some sort of ambient light that felt warm like sunlight, but without a direct source—streamed in through the windows and made everything glow. Or it was possible everything was just glowing of its own accord. Things tended to do that, here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	More Things In Heaven And Earth

**Author's Note:**

> This is...what to call it? A snippet, of sorts. Or an aside, a part of a really long fic I'm currently writing in which Rodney's sister and John's brother get hitched, have kids, and then accidentally...die. Because I'm a horrible person that loves to orphan my infant characters. Anyway, I've been writing this story for awhile but I only just got around to writing these little side stories. They don't fit into the main storyline anywhere but I like to think they still happen, and work as stand-alones or character studies or what have you. Anyway, this is sort of like an appetizer before the main fic. If I ever finish it.
> 
> Un beta'd. Because I actually have no idea where to go to get a beta, so someone should tell me where the super-secret fanfiction club meets because I missed the invites.
> 
> I own nothing except the words.

David walked lazily up to the porch, wrapping an arm around his wife’s waist and leaning his head down on her shoulder. Jeannie didn’t flinch; she’d known he’d been there for awhile. The sunlight—at least, it was some sort of ambient light that felt warm like sunlight, but without a direct source—streamed in through the windows and made everything glow. Or it was possible everything was just glowing of its own accord. Things tended to do that, here.

“You heard?” Jeannie mumbled, her voice bell-like and still a little shocking to David after all this time.

David nodded, listened to the _shhh_ of fabric rubbing against his ear. He didn’t understand why Jeannie still insisted on formalities like clothing, but he’d already learned the hard way what wishing it off gets him, and he wasn’t eager to see if her opinions on the matter had changed.

“I never would’ve guessed,” she pressed on, and her gaze was fixed on a point on the floor, a few meters from her feet.

David shrugged, and Jeannie shifted to look at him, asked “You knew?”

David nodded. “There was once, right before he joined the military… My father had been pretty hard on him, he was still worked up when I went to see him off. We fought. He said some things. It wasn’t…”

Jeannie shushed him, nodded because she understood. “I didn’t know,” she repeats, then elaborates “about my brother. He— There were always girls. A few in college and some after, then there was Jennifer, I thought she was the one…” Jeannie got a dreamy expression on her face then, eyes drifting out of focus for a moment before she snapped back. “I guess not,” she tacked on, then laughed.

David smiled, shifted to pull her a little closer, happy he got to have her here, even if it meant…what it did.

“I know,” Jeannie said, and David didn’t say any of that aloud but she heard it anyway. “Sometimes I think—maybe—it was a good thing. Us being here at the same time, leaving things the way we did, just because they—” She stopped, seemed to chew on her words a bit longer, and that was still one of the things that surprised David about this place. That despite all the perks and the enhancements, there was still room for doubt, uncertainty over your words. People still fought. “If we hadn’t put them in this situation, they wouldn’t have met, and to be perfectly honest, after Jen left him I never thought my brother would find someone else. Even if it’s a little…unexpected.”

David nodded because he knew. John was so torn up after leaving the military, just floating and directionless, and maybe things would’ve worked out alright if they’d kept on going as they had been, giving John his family back and still letting him have his own life, separate from their father and his legacy. But it wouldn’t have been this. John could’ve found someone, maybe, but it wouldn’t have been right, and David knew he would’ve been so secretive about it that it could’ve torn them apart again, if he didn’t play his cards right. 

But none of that really mattered anymore. Maybe in another universe.

“Do you think Mom and Dad know?” Jeannie asked, her mind still speeding ahead while David was caught reminiscing. 

“Of course they know,” he responded, “they’re—”

“I know, I know, we’re all” Jeannie waved a hand around in a circular motion “whatever we are. But that doesn’t mean they can’t ignore the things they want to ignore. You don’t see me snooping around in the lives of people I used to know, do you?”

“I distinctly remember—”

“Stop talking while you’re ahead, David Sheppard,” Jeannie cut him off with a sly smirk, and he shut his mouth because they might’ve been—whatever they were—now but that didn’t mean Jeannie couldn’t find a way to hurt him anyway. “Besides, they’d been rather distracted together lately. If I weren’t completely refusing to think about what it would’ve meant had they met and… _bonded_ while we were still all down there, I’d say they were flirting.” Jeannie scrunched up her nose and shook her head slightly, and yeah, David could see how maybe that would’ve been beyond weird, his father and his mother-in-law hitting it off.

But— “What about my mom, though? Surely my dad must have—”

“No,” Jeannie replied immediately. “Come on, you know how these things work, hun. Guardians can’t just go kick back and relax with their formers, they’ve got actual work to do. Can’t be distracted or disastrous things would happen, all that jazz.” Jeannie didn’t sound particularly pleased with the idea either, but she accepted it as unchangeable truth and that was enough for David. 

“Yeah,” he sighed. “Wish we could’ve been appointed. She didn’t even get to meet our kids, what right does she have to—”

“Shush now,” Jeannie cut him off for the hundredth time. “Don’t go speaking ill of them, they saved your ass while you were earth-side plenty of times. Besides, it’s on a first-come, first-served basis up here. She got assigned to John and you and when you passed, her sole responsibility was John and any family he happened to procure. Which, I guess this counts as a family. This thing they have—”

“It’s a family,” David stated, so surely it surprised even himself, and he tugged Jeannie even closer, basking in the warmth of the sort-of-sun and finally working up the nerve to look downward to the almost-glass they were standing on. The entire world rotated beneath them, expansive but still zooming down to concentrate on just one place, one house in the mountains of Colorado, where his children, grown so much in what seemed like minutes, sat around the kitchen table making messes out of their food and laughing as they tried to be discreet about feeding the dog under the table.

Next to them sat his brother, the lines at the corners of his eyes more pronounced than before, but crinkled as a result of his smile, the real kind that David hadn’t seen in years. Jeannie’s brother, an abrasive man he’d only met a few short, but memorable times, filled the last seat, and he snapped something at the kids about not playing with their food, and then promptly started to instruct them on how to use their carrots properly, designing complicated patterns of things David thought looked like chemical compounds while John chewed his lip and finally gave in, flicking a bit of his mashed potatoes off the end of his spoon and hitting Rodney squarely in the jaw.

From there, the entire dinner was lost to the most epic food fight David had ever borne witness to, and he wondered at what point in his existence he started accepting food fights as harmless pastimes for his offspring, because he must’ve finally fallen off the bandwagon of sanity with the way he was smiling when he saw his daughter smash a glob of something suspiciously gooey into his brother-in-law’s hair.

Jeannie was shaking with silent laughter next to him, clutching at her stomach with one arm, the other held over her mouth, and her eyes were watery and ocean-blue. David smiled, realized again how lucky he was, that he got to have his wife here with him and that his kids still got to have a family. A family that seemed scrapped-together at the last minute, rough at the edges and round in places where it should’ve been square, but a family, nonetheless.


End file.
